T. B. Irving, The Qur’an: The First American Version; Translated and Commentary (1985)

The spellings of “Moslem” , “Kaaba” (for Kaʿba) have a true beginning in ignorance, but they never seem to point any way to salvation. The spelling “Koran” is often used by non-Muslims and western-trained Muslims, the same people as use the spelling “Moslems”, as the late Professor Hitti did in his book Islam in his incredible quotation: “An old-fashioned Moslem (sic) goes through the legal ablutions before he opens the book” (pp. 26-27)! What sort of Muslim did he get his information from? When this is pronounced with a voiced “s”, it gives us “Mozlum”, which means the exact opposite of a man of peace, for ḍhulm or ẓulm is ‘harm’, ‘evil’ etc. A “Moslem” thus means a ‘cruel’ individual like any Oriental tyrant.

Fortunately Arabic itself has a standard orthography and has had one for 1400 years; it is only the ear of the former colonial master or the present glib newspaper or television reporter which needs training — or to be eliminated altogether. English moreover is a deficient language in its use of the Roman alphabet, while French is even worse, or perverse. Some aspects of Arabic spelling should be indicated clearly, and not confused, especially with long vowels and emphatic or velarized consonants: ṭ, ḍ, ḍh (or ẓ), ṣ and the occasional ḷ. These consonants all express phonemic and semantic differentiation, and so they should be indicated clearly in some fashion.

Similar needs exist in phonetics. The sounds of hamza (ʾ) and ʿayn (ʿ) are two difficult letters to transcribe consistently, as well as to explain to the uninitiated. The first or hamza is the glottal stop which gives English the need of its alternate indefinite article “an” in order to avoid this between words that begin with a vowel (as we hear in the childish form of “I want a apple”). The ʿayn is the voiced pharyngeal fricative, and historically has given us the capital “E” in the Roman alphabet, which represented this originally in Phoenician; and this might be used to express this sound, except that it would lead to confusion, especially among the uninitiated. These two important letters in the Arabic and other Semitic alphabets are not usually indicated in the Roman transliteration that many people use; nevertheless they require some representation, especially so students may learn more easily. The words Saʿūdi Arabia and Port Saʿīd are two common examples of this confusion; many people pronounce the common “Saudi” as two syllables only, even newscasters who might know better, while “saʿīd” is not the past participle of the English verb to “say”. In the name of the Prophet’s youngest wife ʿĀʾisha both ʿayn and hamza appear together within the same word which is known fairly commonly but almost always spelled merely approximately (it is the feminine present participle of the verb ʿāsh, to ‘live’, and thus means a ‘living’ woman).

Long and short vowels moreover should be indicated clearly and not confused; these distinctions are basic to Arabic prosody and especially for proper Qurʾānic diction. I use the grave accent of French “`” to show the alif maqṣūra, or the long à representing a hidden i or y in the root as in the names Mūsà or ʿĪsà. The digraph “ou” is a hopeless representation because it cannot show whether the Arabic vowel is long or short. Emphatic or velarized consonants all have phonemic and semantic differentiation, and so they should also be expressed clearly. Perhaps capital letters might be